Analytics

How do ideas about conservation justice emerge? How do multilateral environmental negotiations produce ideas of what conservation and environmental justice are?

How do the processes of representation in global environmental governance construct, reinforce, or marginalize different identities to shape how ideas of justice emerge and are negotiated?

How do the politics of representation in the climate negotiations shape justice possibilities? What characteristics of identity gain traction, evolve, and disappear in negotiations?

What are the pathways through and conditions under which marginalized and underrepresented groups effectively pursue representation and affect governance processes that directly impact their ways of living?

How do the practices and politics of events like COP21 shape how groups influence global environmental governance processes?

How can we measure, operationalize, and model influence to capture these dynamics?

​To address these questions, we use three innovative methodologies, collaborative event ethnography, visual ethnography, and digital ethnography, to examine how the practices and politics of global environmental governance shape the possibilities for influence. Using a team-based approach, we collect ethnographic data that includes participant observation, field notes, audio recordings, photos, and gathering of materials to answer the following specific research questions:

How are indigenous peoples represented at the event, both by indigenous peoples and by others, within and across physical, symbolic, and virtual spaces? Who are the actors making claims of indigenous representation and how are these claims made?

What are the ongoing processes, strategies, and representations that constitute indigenous presence and influence across the event?

What contestations over representation emerge, in what spaces, performed by whom, with what linkages to past, present, and future events and peoples, and with what effect?

How do gender, class, generational, regional and other differences shape indigenous identities and representation; how do these representations interplay with influence?

Drawing from Brosius and Campbell's analytics for their 2010 collaborative event ethnography at the Convention on Biological Diversity (see Campbell et al 2014), we use three main analytical themes to structure our data collection and analysis:

Theme 1: Politics of TranslationThe politics of translation refers to how different actors define problems, solutions, and their roles in solving the problem (problematization), recruiting others to join and assume certain roles in the process of translation (interessement), defining roles and convincing others to accept and take on these roles (enrolment), and speaking for other passive actors in a network (mobilization) (Callon 1986).

Theme 2: Politics of ScaleThe politics of scale refers to how different processes of scaling, such as localizing, globalizing, regionalizing, connecting scales, creation of new scales, shapes the ways ideas about conservation and justice emerge.

Theme 3: Politics of PerformanceThe politics of performance brings in a dramaturgical approach to “analyze how these sites are managed, and roles performed, in ways that are not only constitutive of the subject identity of participants, but defined in ways that shape the legitimation of knowledge” and can be used to exert influence (Campbell and Brosius 2010, COP10 proposal). Through this analytical lens, we draw attention to how knowledge and identities are legitimized and delegitimized, how roles are performed, and how shared meanings are constructed and deconstructed. We also pay attention to semiotics, e.g. how meaning is created through signs, symbols, and significance.